Florida “sports consultant” sentenced to eight-year prison term

A south Florida sportsbetting advisor who had claimed to be “the sports consultant to the stars” has reportedly been sentenced to serve eight years in prison after pleading guilty in September to five federal charges related to extortion, fraud and racketeering.

According to a report from the Sun-Sentinel newspaper, Adam Meyer of Southwest Ranches was sentenced on Friday during a federal court hearing in Milwaukee for his part in a scheme that extorted $45 million from one of his sportsbetting clients, Gary Sadoff.

Prosecutors stated that 66-year-old Sadoff, who owns a Wisconsin liquor distribution business, began purchasing “picks” from Meyer in 2007 but was allegedly targeted for the latter’s extortion scheme after reducing his sportsbetting activities in 2009. Over a five-year period before his arrest in 2014, Meyer is said to have concocted elaborate lies and stories in order to get cash before using the money to buy real estate including his Broward County home along with jewelry and expensive cars.

Sadoff is said to have attempted to stop the flow of money in April of 2012 but Meyer subsequently recruited a 33-year-old man known as Ray Batista before the pair hired a private jet and flew to Wisconsin in order to visit their target near his home in the city of Fond Du Lac. During an ensuing meeting in a deserted parking lot, Meyer is reported to have been in tears when he asked Sadoff for a payment of $9.8 million while Batista, who subsequently received four years in prison after pleading guilty to his part in the fraud, sat silently in the back seat with a hand gun in which he had deliberately chambered a round.

Sadoff subsequently sent the cash to Meyer over the next eight days and is said to have asked the sentencing judge to ban Meyer from ever contacting him again. The victim additionally reportedly stated he was “grateful that no one was injured” and that the scheme had been “uncovered by law enforcement”.

As part of his defense, Meyer’s legal team claimed that the 44-year-old had been diagnosed with several serious mental health conditions including one “where a different identity or personality periodically surfaces to Meyer’s detriment”. His defense moreover called for leniency due to claims that he had suffered with long-term drug abuse problems and a lifelong gambling addiction while the most bizarre excuse saw the defendant assert that he had been a “deep cover informant and valuable source for numerous federal and state law enforcement officers and agencies” since 2000 or 2001.

Meyer is said to have asserted that he had helped the Federal Bureau Of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Secret Service to arrest and convict “many individuals” and had enabled the government to seize “hundreds of millions of dollars from offshore bookmaking operations as well as significant sums of money in domestic operations”.

While acknowledging that Meyer had assisted law enforcement in a number of investigations over several years, prosecutors reportedly gave the defendant mixed reviews and revealed that his cooperation agreement had been cancelled once authorities discovered he had been secretly committing the $45 million fraud at the same time as aiding law enforcement.